A GORILLA IN LONDON.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5215, 8 December 1877, Page 1 (Supplement)

A GORILLA IN LONDON.

(From the London Timet.)

Pongo, now on exhibition at the Westminster Aquarium, is the first gorilla that has been safely brought to Europe, and he has now been thirteen months an inhabitant of the temperate zone. Even in Africa the gorilla rarely lives long in captivity. Pongo wa3 found by the Prussian Natural History Expedition to Africa chained up in a village on the Gaboon. Dr. Falkenstein brought him to Berlin, and sold him for 20,000 marks to the Berlin Aquarium. He is about three years and ten months old, and is believed to have about eighteen months before him before the dangerous period of teething will begin. He is three and threequarter feet in height, of great girth round chest and stomach, is covered with black and iron grey hair, and has coal black face, feet, and hands. The hands are the most strikingly human parb of the animal, but as he usually walks on all fours, bending the fingers in to do so as a child does, there is a Hat callous mass on the back of the fingers near the middle phalanx. When he is pleased at being noticed, or wants to be noticed, Pongo claps his hands with a loud report, squatting on the floor, and dropping his hands afterwards in his lap. Sometimes he wraps himself in a cloak he hae, or swings about the room by the ropes of a trapeze, but does not climb them. He has for companions a little chimpauzee and a dog, and is much the least active, although far the strongest, of the party. His foot is more like the foot of a man than that of any other ape, but the toes are longer than a man's, and better used for grasping. Of couse he has no tail. He very seldom stands up like a human being, but his favorite position is to sit on the floor and hug a stick or an umbrella, and he is very pleased to be trusted with an umbrella, although he does not always deßerve confidence, because he has a tendency to open it in a new and expeditious way, and no umbrella frame can resist his very great muscular strength of arm and jaw. At a private reception which Pongo held recently, Mr. Prank Buckland tried to teach him to write ; but, although he (lid make some marks on the paper, he preferred to carry the pencil to his mouth, aud swallowed about an inch of the best Cumberland lead. Pongo drank half a glass of beer in the presence of the audience, aud also ate some roast beef and potatoes ; but ordinarily he lives chiefly on vegetables, and wakes enormous meals of thein. Iu the morning they give him milk and fruits, cherries, currants, rasberries, &c. At midday he has a

basin of boiled rice, or anything else that he can get. In the course of the afternoon he has some more fruit, and, perhaps, some eau sucree, or wine and water. In the evening more milk is brought, and this, with bread and butter and eggs, completes his supper. He goes to bed at 8 o'clock, and sleeps a 3 late as 8 o'clock the next morning. It must be remembered he is very young. But he has learnt to smoke—at least when tho cigarette has an amber mouthpiece, for he does not like the taste of tobacco. He puffs out the clouds of blue smoke from his wide nostrils. Two hundred thousand people are said to have visited him in Berlin since June 28, 1876.